Thursday, May 23, 2013

Updating VMware Tools quickly multiple Linux servers

Ever want to update a bunch of servers quickly? ESX updates come once every 2-3 months (give or take) and it can be annoying to update all of the servers. What I do is I will pull down the update and place it on a webserver that is accessible. You can even change this step to SCP but that involves setting up SSH keys for a simple file grab.

You'll have to initiate the VMtools update at least once, so you can pull down the files from VMWare vSphere. I place the new updates in the same location each time, symlinking the new files to "vmtools-linux-latest.tar.gz".

Once the initial "prep" is done, I'll usually use SSH from my management server where the SSH keys are already setup to each box then SSH using a text file like so: